Larger-than-usual understates the magnitude of the deception in the commission’s report, don’t you think? Perhaps President Bush didn’t think he had already done enough to destroy the commission’s credibility, so he demanded secrecy for a major section of its report as well.

“Too dangerous,” local experts said. “Stay away from there.” Yet EPA ignored the advice, went in with their bulldozers, destroyed the dam, then mumbled “Whoops” to themselves while they quietly watched a decades old reservoir of metal laden water flow into the river. Afterwards they went home. They let people along the river discover for themselves, days later, where EPA’s reputation for callous stupidity comes from.

The police officer who does a somersault on some suburban boulevard as he charges in to subdue a bikini-clad teenager at a neighborhood pool party, looks a lot more ridiculous viewed on YouTube than he did when he surprised everyone with his faux manliness. Later on you have a lot of time to absorb the self-infatuation such behavior displays.

We always think we have to obey government, because after all, government makes laws. This case shows that you can disobey, and force the agency that gives illegal orders to back down. We ought to keep this example in mind. The FBI may think it saved face here, but we need to recognized what actually happened. The feds picked a public fight with one of the giants, and lost.